China’s Scientific Research at ‘Turning Point,’ Study Says

A researcher walks at China National Genebank in Tianjin, China, April 2, 2014.

Reuters

China may have the world’s fastest supercomputers and boast the second-highest spending on scientific research and development – but its academic impact lags behind that of its global competitors.

A new paper by the Nature Publishing Group finds that a lack of funding for basic research, insufficient training and poor communication skills among researchers have left China punching academically below its weight.

The paper — based on online surveys of nearly 1,700 scientists across China in 2015 and in-depth interviews with scientists in Beijing, Shanghai, Nanjing and Xi’an — looks at the government’s enormous effort to steer more resources toward innovation. That’s part of a transition to find new drivers of growth as the manufacturing economy runs out of steam.

“Just like China’s economy, Chinese science is at a turning point,” said Charlotte Liu, who heads of the greater China operations of Springer Nature, which owns Nature Publishing. The paper’s suggestions, she said, “provide the opportunity for China not just to be seen as a research giant but to establish an entrenched culture of innovation that can establish it as a global science and technology leader.”

Nature Publishing said that the launch of its project in China came early this year, long before the merger and before Springer made its retractions. In a statement, Ms. Liu said there was no connection between the retractions and the China project. She added that “research ethics is an integral part of the ecosystem of science.”

Without directly addressing that controversy, the paper mentioned some of the difficulties Chinese researchers have faced regarding peer review, citing the problem of “poor quality or unethical” commercial language-polishing services. Such companies have been blamed in several cases of false peer reviews among Chinese researchers.

In order to address issues related to those firms, China should support the establishment of a global, industry-wide accreditation system for language-editing services, as well as a blacklist for companies that break ethical boundaries, the Nature Publishing paper suggested.

“Scientific misconduct is a global problem. But when stories of misconduct by researchers in China make global headlines, the reputation of Chinese science as a whole suffers more than when similar cases happen in other countries. This is clearly unfair, but it makes the need to tackle misconduct all the more important,” the paper said.

It also included the perspective of some Chinese academics who said they felt that the system is skewed against them.

“I feel there is a bias against Chinese authors in publishing,” said one research group leader from Xi’an, whose name was not given. “Most editors and reviewers are from Western countries. It’s not surprising that they will give more time and trust to an article from a famous (Western) institute or lab, and they tend to be harsher to an article from a Chinese lab that they never heard of.”

Yet those efforts haven’t translated into success in the academic sphere, according to the Nature Publishing paper, which stated that “the average academic impact of Chinese research does not match its exceptional growth in output.”

“While China is making great progress in high-quality publications, it lags behind the world average in many subject areas in normalized citation impact, an indicator of academic impact,” it said.

The paper also cited concerns that China “lags behind in producing break­through research with wide-ranging impact.” It cited one recent, widely-heralded scientific achievement as a likely outlier, rather than a sign of future success.

“Many worry that the impact made by Tu Youyou, who was awarded China’s first Nobel Prize in science this year for the work that led to a treatment for malaria that has saved countless lives, is the exception that proves the rule,” the Nature Publishing paper said.

It made a wide range of suggestions. China should take more risks in funding more basic research and projects whose potential impact may not be clear; assign senior scientists to mentor younger researchers; and better train researchers in scientific writing in English, the paper said.

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